Rosenthal: Grumbling about owners like Mets’ Steve Cohen? MLB needs more of them

All those complaining about the latest eruption in baseball salaries only wish the Mets’ Steve Cohen owned their team. And if not Cohen, the Phillies’ John Middleton or Padres’ Peter Seidler.

Yankees fans gripe about Hal Steinbrenner, but he, too, has spent heavily this offseason, albeit mostly on one player, Aaron Judge. Combined, the Yankees, Phillies, Mets and Padres have invested $1.5 billion in free agents, more than 60 percent of the industry’s total outlay.

Bad for the sport? It depends who you root for. Some executives and owners are privately grumbling about the sport’s latest economic eruption. Some fans of small-market teams are even more exasperated than before. Yet, even the disenchanted can take comfort in one of the sport’s enduring realities: The big-money flexes generate shock-and-awe buzz, but guarantee nothing.

Seriously, would anyone be surprised, considering their respective ages and injury histories, if Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer and Brandon Nimmo all fell into various states of disrepair next season, and the Mets sputtered around them?

Don’t get me wrong: I wish there were 30 Cohens, one for each franchise. Not likely, obviously — Cohen is one of a kind, the 38th richest man in America according to Forbes, with a real-time net worth of $17.5 billion. But in an industry mostly content with profits, Cohen is obsessed with winning. Middleton and Seidler share his obsession, which is exactly what fans should want.

This is a new breed of owner, operating under a new collective-bargaining agreement that reflects the union’s success in raising the luxury-tax thresholds and staving off harsher penalties. Cohen took over the Mets in late 2020. Seidler became the Padres’ control person not long after that. Middleton became a 48 percent shareholder in the Phillies in 2014 and their control person in 2016. With any luck, the Nationals and Angels, both currently for sale, will be bought by like-minded individuals or groups, and the turnover will continue with the Reds, A’s and Pirates, to name three clubs that need a change.

Actually, I could list a whole bunch more. The game needs not only more motivated owners, but also more forward thinkers. Now that the industry has recovered from two COVID-damaged seasons faster than Trea Turner scoring from second on a single, what was the point of the owners’ lockout exactly?

Granted, new owners who lack the personal wealth of Cohen or even Seidler can only do so much in a sport facing a systemic divide between big markets and small. New Royals owner John Sherman is operating in Kansas City, not New York City. David Blitzer, who recently gained a 25 percent stake in the Guardians with the option to become majority owner in six years, can’t snap his fingers and turn Cleveland into Chicago.

The big-market, small-market conundrum will be part of baseball as long as teams generate the majority of their revenues locally rather than nationally, opposite of the NFL. But spare me the sky-is-falling narrative regarding the game’s financial have-nots, which we’ve heard for pretty much the last century.

No question, in a sport without a salary cap, low-revenue teams operate at a disadvantage. It’s extremely difficult for such clubs to win a World Series, much less sustain long-term success. But Seidler, whose Padres play in the nation’s eighth-largest city by population but only the 27th-largest media market, represents the counter to the poor-poor-pitiful-me argument.

Seidler’s seeming desperation to bring San Diego its first Series title is perhaps informed by his two bouts with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, not to mention his desire to vanquish the Dodgers, the team owned by his late grandfather, Walter O’Malley. Do we know where his money is coming from? Not exactly. Is he engaging in deficit spending? Almost certainly. But Seidler is valuing entertainment over efficiency, spending money to make money.

Maybe his plan will go awry, and the Padres will stage another of their dreaded sell-offs. But Seidler’s team drew 2.99 million last season, its second-highest total after 2004, the club’s first year at Petco Park. The Padres’ home attendance in 2023, with the arrival of Xander Bogaerts, return of Fernando Tatis Jr., Juan Soto and Josh Hader playing their first full seasons in San Diego, and the team coming off an appearance in the National League Championship Series, should go even higher.

Not every small- to mid-market ownership can operate this way. Very few if any share Seidler’s financial exuberance. When the Royals won the 2015 World Series, they finished with the 13th-highest 40-man roster payroll. In a sense, they still have not recovered from their relative splurge while trying to keep that competitive window open. The Rays and Guardians will scratch and claw, often displaying more imagination than their high-income brethren. Yet, such clubs only grow more discouraged when the financial gap widens.

Cohen, of course, is stretching that gap to new levels, but the other owners knew what they were getting when they approved him — a very rich, very smart fanboy. The Mets’ first major warning shot under Cohen came last offseason, when they signed Scherzer, then 37, to a three-year contract with an average annual value of $43.33 million, breaking the previous AAV record by more than $7 million.

The signing evoked a scene from John Helyar’s classic 1994 book on baseball ownership, “Lords of the Realm.” Helyar, writing how the Cubs in 1992 signed Ryne Sandberg to a record $7.1 million AAV, breaking Bobby Bonilla’s mark of $5.8 million, relates that Astros owner John McMullen screamed at Cubs chairman Stanton Cook, “Don’t you know there’s a number between five and seven? It’s six!”

Cohen evidently saw no numbers between 36 and 43.33, and for good measure signed Verlander, an even older starting pitcher, for the exact same AAV last week. The Mets’ eight-year, $162 million deal with Nimmo might be a bigger reach, considering the center fielder only twice has played more than 92 games in a full season. You can almost hear other owners snickering at Cohen condescendingly, hissing, “He’ll learn.”

Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t. Maybe he simply doesn’t care. In the meantime, he’s embarrassing a number of his fellow lords. Ownership representatives of the Nationals, Dodgers, Giants, Red Sox, Cubs and Phillies are also listed among Forbes’ 400 wealthiest Americans. Cohen is not the only rich owner, just the richest.

The Nats are for sale; they get a pass. So do the Dodgers, who have carried a top payroll every year since 2013 and now seem intent on mixing in their next wave of young players. But the Red Sox, Cubs and Giants rank 12th, 15th and 16th, respectively, in the current payroll standings, as compiled by Fangraphs. And 18 of Jim Bowden’s top 25 free agents are off the board.

Complain all you want about Cohen, Seidler and Middleton. The game needs more like ’em.

(Top photo of Steve Cohen: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)